


Five Times Jowy Atreides Almost Believed in Luca Blight (and once he remembered not to)

by Mithrigil



Category: Suikoden II
Genre: Gen, Monsters, Poison, Power Dynamics, delicious irony
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-16
Updated: 2012-02-16
Packaged: 2017-10-31 07:06:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,484
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/341288
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mithrigil/pseuds/Mithrigil
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Today, I stood before Luca Blight once again. I listened to what he said, and I became something terrible. But maybe...no. Maybe I was only taken in by his strength. Taken in, and terrified of it. I asked for power, once, but maybe I was really grasping at Luca’s shadow.” - Suikogaiden 1, Chapter 2</p>
            </blockquote>





	Five Times Jowy Atreides Almost Believed in Luca Blight (and once he remembered not to)

**1: Prince Luca Blight’s Word is as Law**

The castle Pete and Pilika have built, out of upturned buckets and bowls and earthenware cups, is a marvel of architecture. It’s taken over most of the kitchen of the White Deer Inn. They’ve spread out a tattered blanket for a lake, with a brown double-placemat island in the middle, and if the stacked teacups and sticks that make up the garrison wall spill out into the blue, it’s okay.

“That’s the moat,” Pete explains. “Except moats are carved in but this one was there all along. It’s the safest castle in the world because it’s on a -- um. It sticks out into the water.”

“Peninsula,” Jowy says.

“Pninsla,” Pete says, and as far as mispronunciations go, it could have been far worse.

Pilika says nothing.

The funny thing about playtime when your playmate is shy is that, more often than not, it turns play into work. Jowy knows this firsthand, all things considered, after growing up with Riou. (Nanami cancelled that out, sometimes.) But Jowy remembers building castles and chasing ghosts and games of manhunt that were as draining, as difficult, as any school session. Eventually, he’d run out of things to say. And with nothing to talk about, it always turned into a contest of who could build the highest tower.

He kneels to Pilika and Pete’s level, careful not to disturb the towers of buckets and cups. “Was it your idea to put the castle on the lake, Pilika?” He looks her in the eyes, keeps them for as long as he can before she curls up and stares at the floor.

“Uh-huh,” Pete answers for her. “Pilika put the lake blanket down.”

 _But she didn’t say anything,_ Jowy thinks, and forces the thought as far back in his mind as he can. Pilika doesn’t deserve fake smiles. “That’s great,” he says. “Can you show me around?”

She doesn’t call him Uncle Jowy anymore. She doesn’t call anyone anything anymore. But she takes him by the hand and leads him gingerly around the castle perimeter, as if all of them can walk on imaginary water without kicking up imaginary waves.

He asks her, here and there, if this bucket is where the soldiers sleep, or if that bowl is the kitchen, or what they could find to make a castle flag. Pete answers for her, every time. Jowy holds Pilika’s hand a little tighter, and pretends nothing’s wrong.

Luca’s sword never went anywhere near Pilika’s mouth, and he still shut her up, just like he said he would.

 

**2: Prince Luca Blight Encourages Honorable Conduct in the Highland Army**  
 _(in a sense)_

They’re flaying a rapist alive today. Attendance is mandatory. Jowy stands just slightly in Seed’s shadow on the Generals’ Dais while Luca sees to the punishment personally.

It’s hard to watch, but it’s death to flinch.

Jowy keeps his hands at his sides, and watches Luca’s. Luca’s hands are one of the most striking things about him, as broad as his face but with long fingers that don’t look nearly as brutish without gauntlets. And flaying one of his own soldiers alive is delicate enough work that he’s taken off the gauntlets. He’s spattered with blood and bile up to his elbows. The soldier looses his bowels and Luca doesn’t stop.

“Listen up, dogs!” Luca yells, holding the insensate soldier by the hair to keep him from collapsing into the dirt like a sandbag. “You do what this pig did to one of the refugees, you end up like this. You do this to another soldier, your entire company ends up like this. Any questions?”

Of course no one has any. They’re as mute as Pilika.

“Guess not,” Luca says, and drops the soldier where he is. There’s enough blood and filth that the dirt underneath them has turned to red mud. “No one touches this piece of shit. Not even after he’s dead. He’s not worth it. Got it? Good. Now start up the cooking fires, I’m hungry!”

 

**3: Prince Luca Blight is Egalitarian in his Employ of Talented Subordinates**

“So there I was,” Seed goes on now that he’s finished honing this edge of his sword, “not much older than you -- taller, but not much older -- and Kiba’s lefties were dragging me and that poor sap to the stocks like they were hussies pulling on our ears, if you know what I mean.”

“Yeah,” Jowy says, even though he doesn’t, but he’s found with Seed it’s better to let the story go on.

“And they throw us in and latch us down, and Kiba’s going on about how we’re disorderly disgraces and all that, and he makes a big speech. More eloquent than the Prince, I say.”

Culgan coughs into his fist.

Seed waves him off with the whetstone. “Hey, he won’t care if he hears. Anyway, Jowy, I tell you, if the brass don’t kill you and they don’t scare you straight, they’ll scare you straight here anyway, so don’t let him scare you off. And look! I’m still here.”

“Still here in the Highland Army?” Jowy asks, because what he really needs to know is _still in Luca’s service?_ , but there’s no way to ask that if they’re so concerned he’ll get wind of it.

“Still here in the high command,” Seed corrects, which answers neither question and begs another. He swipes his whetstone down the blade. “I mean, the Prince is about the only one’ll take a bastard like me now, but that’s how things are.”

Jowy nods, because the story’s apparently over -- and then replays the words in his head. “Wait, you mean literally?”

“You don’t see me flinging a surname around, do you?” Seed laughs. “I’m about as much a bastard as you are. More of one, I think.”

“But --” Jowy cuts off the thought with a quick shake of his head. “No, I think I understand.”

“Give him a prize, Culgan,” Seed jokes. It startles Jowy into laughing. He hasn’t laughed since Riou.

 

**4: In Terms of Raw Military Might, Prince Luca Blight is Unmatched**

Between the Highland corps, the mercenaries, the refugees and conscripts from captive State towns, Luca holds direct command of thirty thousand soldiers. If Harmonia comes through, which Jowy is sure they will, he can revise that to fifty thousand.

The numbers speak for themselves. Loudly, at that -- to the tune of resounding _yes, sir_ s that shake the earth. The Highland Army doesn’t bother with fifes and drums.

 

**5: Prince Luca Blight is a Respectful and Caring Older Brother**  
 _(sort of)_

“And then you’ll die,” Luca says to Jillia over dinner. “He’ll be a perfect knight at the wedding, and then he’ll hold you down and plow you until you scream, and then you’ll die.”

Jowy puts his spoon down on the edge of the bowl and doesn’t pick it up.

“Brother, please,” Jillia sighs.

“Fine, maybe he won’t.” Luca slices into his meat with the kind of cavalier zeal he usually uses on State townspeople. 

That Jowy is able to have that thought and not cringe stands as testimony that he’s been by Luca’s side for far too long. Or, perhaps, that the antitoxins and poisons he’s been dosing himself with for the past two weeks are starting to eat away at his brain. He suspects the latter. And he suspects the latter, again, without cringing.

“Maybe he’ll make you like it first,” Luca goes on. “Maybe he’ll make you think you’re a slut for wanting it. And then you’ll die.”

Jillia shuts her eyes and tenses her hands before she can hide them under the tablecloth. “He’s sitting right here.”

“It’s nothing he hasn’t heard before.” Luca lets out a laugh that should make Jowy shiver. It doesn’t. “I bet Jowy did plenty of girls before he asked for you. And I bet they all wish they’d never been born. Unless they’re dead.” He grins, leans over at Jowy as if to put all his teeth on display. “Are they dead, Jowy? Did you kill all those whorish little sows?”

“I’d rather not talk about it, your Highness,” Jowy says, because as long as he says something it means Luca hasn’t stolen his tongue too.

 

**0: King Luca Blight Lets Jowy Live, and That is Just Plain Foolish**  
 _(isn’t it?)_

Jowy wakes up in a softer bed than the one he used to sleep in in his stepfather’s house in Kyaro. He stares at the ceiling until he can be sure that no, those are fixed images, a fresco of clouds and treetops and wolves, not a preview of the afterlife.

The Black Sword Rune pulses and stutters, in Jowy’s right hand. It might be laughing at him. Its laugh has the same pulse and vehemence as Luca’s, however silent.

The poison hasn’t left Jowy’s veins. It might never, no matter how many antitoxins he drinks.

***


End file.
